I turned the key in the ignition. Nothing. I switched on the radio. Nothing. Flat battery. Even the clock had stopped. I checked the switches to see if I’d left a light on. Nothing. I rang the AA. ‘Someone will be with you in up to 80 minutes,’ said the controller after he’d taken down a few details.
The car was in the station car park, nose against the railings, facing the platforms. I sat in the driver’s seat and contemplated the litter-strewn railway tracks and the abandoned, partially dismantled milk depot behind. I smelt vomit, which I traced to a dash of dried vomit on the lapel of my suit.
I got out of the car and leaned against the railings. If he’d said someone would be along in 80 minutes, I could have gone for a stroll along the river or found a café. But ‘up to’ 80 minutes meant I had to stay near the car. Fortunately, my brain was as flat as my battery. Boredom was the least of my problems. I got back in the car and sat there like the Buddha for 80 minutes.
I knew 80 minutes had passed because the AA controller rang me to tell me it had. It was his duty to tell me, he said. It was also his duty, he said, to tell me I was going to have to wait for another 25. ‘You’re in a safe place, sir, I hope?’ he said. I thanked him and stared at the railway tracks and at the empty platform opposite. Almost my entire life has been spent contemplating Victorian railway architecture, it seemed to me at that moment. In its day it must have appeared very fine — amazing even. But now its civic-minded grandeur serves only to remind us of the purposeless of our consumerist lives and of what a nice idea civilisation was.
I thought about civilisation, and how wonderful it must have been to be on the receiving end of it. Then I remembered. I had done something civilised once, and quite recently, too. Just before Christmas, the editor of the ‘Style and Travel’ section of this magazine sent me on a week-long package tour of Guyana’s rainforest. (The resulting article was in last week’s issue.) The latter part of the week was spent at a ranch on the Rupununi river, close to the Brazilian border, belonging to the naturalist Diane McTurk. For our last evening, she organised a provisioned excursion downriver specifically to see the opening of a flower. And that, if I may say so, is what I call civilised.
We went in two long flat-bottomed boats with Amerindian paddlers seated fore and aft. At sunset we turned off the river and into a small lake covered with water lilies. The lake was so exquisitely beautiful in the mellow sunlight, it was like some kind of a joke. The flower we’d come to see opening belonged to the giant water lily, Victoria regia. Waiting for the swan-white petals to open, like eager patrons outside a newly popular nightclub, were dozens of flying beetles.
We drifted alongside the flower and also waited. The light changed from gold to pink to purple. The paddlers handed round neat triangular sandwiches and pieces of homemade shortbread and served ice-cold rum punch from cocktail glasses. As the sun finally disappeared below the trees at the edge of the lake, the flower opened. It opened as surely and slowly and steadily as an electric garage door — and in flew the beetles. When 20 or 30 beetles had gone in, the flower decided it was full — health and safety regulations, we supposed — and the petals closed for the night. The tourists applauded. The paddlers smiled sympathetically and looked away.
I’ve forgotten what went on inside the flower; I think Diane McTurk delicately alluded to an ‘orgy’. Whatever it was, in their gyrations or agitations the beetles coated themselves in pollen and at dawn the flower released them to cross-pollinate another flower the following evening. The lake was now pitch dark. As a sort of grand finale we were bombarded with leaping fish, some of which lay dying around our feet, and the night air was alive with the swoops of giant fish-eating bats.
‘All right, mate?’ said the AA man, tapping on the window. ‘Sorry. Miles away,’ I said. I got out of the car and he got in. ‘So what did you leave on?’ he said, bobbing about, checking switches. ‘Nothing,’ I said. But these AA blokes make me laugh. Their diagnostic powers verge on the clairvoyant. ‘You left the boot open, didn’t you?’ he said, accusingly. ‘I did?’ I said. He got out of the car and easily raised the unlatched boot lid with a crooked forefinger. ‘Yes, mate,’ he said. ‘Three boot lights on these cars.’
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